Add Up Articles Directory | Free Articals | New Articles Daily

Health care of the community is very important and a vital responsibility of public health authorities. To achieve the purpose of providing timely, equitable and efficient health care and examine the effectiveness of health care facilities available to the population of the region, the authorities initiated the health information exchange. Health information system is to communicate within the community or hospital within the region.

Health information exchange (HIE) enables to electronically move scientific information among different health care information systems and also preserve the meaning of the data being exchanged. HIE facilitates access to and retrieval of clinical information to assist in rendering safe, prompt and effective health care to patients. Public health authorities also use the facts available in HIE to analyze and review the health of the population in a stipulated region.

Other than HIE, CPOE is another IT enabled health care tool that provides for instructions of relevant physicians to be communicated over a computer network, to the medical staff or to the administration responsible to carry out the instructions. Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) is a method that minimizes the delay in following up the instructions, reduces the mistakes related to handwriting, allows the instruction to be entered at point of care, helps in checking errors for incorrect or duplicate tests and simplifies the posting and record of charges.

The benefits of CPOE are varied and help patients receive timely and effective care.

- The different views of physicians are assimilated and directions issued to all concerned and involved health care support staff to circumvate scheduling problems, improve response time and avert any conflict with existing instructions.

- CPOE takes care of the safety of the patient. It allows actual time identification of the patient, recommends suitable drug dose, provides details of unfavorable drug reaction, helps check on allergies and treatment deviation. These information's are essential for perfect advice from a doctor.

- The CPOE process is user friendly and allows efficient use by unusual and new users to use the instructions and work flow.

- Informations are personal and verified by electronic signature.

- The system helps generate statistical data and online reports that help administrators evaluate patient information and make changes to improve productivity and maximum utilization of resources. Such information also helps in planning, training and scrutiny of events for patient safety.

- The system can be accessed from any locality through various communicating devices including Personal Computers and tablet computers, and it have, handles and disseminates information for all at the spot of care.

- Earlier oral or hand written directives and prescriptions of doctors were subject to misinterpretation by the medical support staff leading to errors and injuries to patients. The CPOE process prevents such prescribing errors and improves the security and efficiencyof medication.

Thus, the HIE and CPOE systems have done a world of good to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the health care structure and scheme in the community and region.